Thank You For Playing

I want to formally thank all of the participants of The Novella Challenge. I hope you had as much fun as I did! I certainly read more novellas than I would have without the challenge. And after reading all your reviews of novellas, I’ve been able to mooch a few that were highly recommended. I can’t wait to read them!

I apologize for the lack of involvement after May. My wedding took way more time than I thought it would, marriage itself is taking way more time than I thought it would, and TLC Book Tours is taking way more time than I thought it would. Anyone see a pattern here?

I had been hoping to do a couple of drawings to keep the momentum going, but alas, it didn’t happen. Instead, I’ve drawn two names and I’ll be sending each of them $20 gift cards to Amazon. I’m hoping that will assuage my guilt. 😀

The two winners are:

Becky

Raidergirl3

I’ll be sending the Amazon gift things to you via email so you can pick whatever book you want. Well, I assume you’ll pick a book. But if you do pick a book, it doesn’t have to be a novella…but I surely wouldn’t mind if it was. 😀

I’m not positive that I’ll do this again next year, but either way, thanks for playing!

 

Quick Check In

Just a quick note to tell everyone that I’m having a BLAST! I almost wish I’d finished all my novellas, because after reading people’s reviews of different books, I think I’ll be up to my eyeballs in novellas alone as far as books I want to read. 😀 Ah, it’s tough having a love affair with books.

I think I’ve got everyone who’s participating listed in the sidebar. If I missed you, leave a comment or send me an email at trish dot browning at gmail dot com and I’ll add you to the list asap.

You can post your reviews HERE. This is a page dedicated to the reviews of the books you’ve read. I was originally going to repost each person’s review here on this site, but between planning a wedding and working two jobs (I finished the second job April 30th), I just couldn’t keep up. So I think I’m scrapping that idea, unless someone can help me come up with a good alternative.

I’ve got lots of ideas for prizes, but that will have to wait until after the wedding. So expect lots of commotion around the end of June/beginning of July.

Let me know if you have any other questions, and thanks again for participating!!!!

 

Let the Games Begin!

Happy April 1st! This marks the official start of the Novella Challenge. Some people have already begun reading their novellas, and others are more of the rule-following variety. 😉 I didn’t mind people starting early…I felt like it was akin to holding a piece of cake under someone’s nose and saying ‘But you can’t eat it until next week! Mwah ahaha!!’

Please leave a comment on the page that is dedicated to reviews of the novellas that we read if you review any books you read for this challenge on your blog. If you do leave a comment with a link to your review, let me know if I can post it verbatim on that same page, just so people don’t have to click back and forth. I will be sure to include the link to where the review originally appeared.

People are welcome to join at any time! The challenge will end on September 30, 2008. I will be doing random giveaways to those who are participating.

Anywho, I think that’s about it. I’m so excited to be doing this!

 

Challenge Summary and Update

Because you shouldn’t have to read through my stream-of-consciousness as to why I decided to do this, here’s a summary:

1. Read six novellas between April 2008 and September 2008. You do not need to post your choices in advance. 
2. The novella needs to be between 100 and 250 pages (because who has time to count the words in a book, Mr. Wikipedia?). Some leeway is definitely allowed (some of The Green Mile novellas by Stephen King are 96 pages, and I would hate to exclude those. I’m a lover not a hater.).
3. Sign up! Leave a comment and I’ll add your name to the sidebar. There will be prizes (yet to be determined). I’m a competitive and loves-to-win-stuff kinda gal, so I couldn’t resist offering prizes.
4. Please review or let people know what you’ve read. You can do that on your own blog (linking back to here) or you can post a comment here or you can post the review here. Whatever.
5. Need not have your own blog to play.

Fortunately, not all of us bookworms are creatively challenged (like me), and Eva from A Striped Armchair has come up with this button (imagine me pulling the sheet off of an easel to reveal the graphic in a very dramatic fashion):

Isn’t it cute?! (I hope I did it right…if not, please let me know)

So go forth and place this button on your blog. But don’t forget to sign up here (prizes and all that).

Oh, and I will be creating a separate tab so that you can see allll the novella’s we’ve come up with. Soon. Oh, so very soon.

 

This Is How It All Started

***Edited to add: Heather had a great point: Joining this challenge will help you complete your 100 Books Challenge. And these books are quick reads. Heather is BRILLIANT!

This site is dedicated to the Novella Challenge, which is hosted by trish.

The reason behind the Novella Challenge:

I’m an avid reader (I don’t have time to be voracious, so avid will have to do) and in the beginning of 2008 I had two novellas that I would have put off if I hadn’t made myself read them. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read the books, they were just so small, and I gravitate towards the chunksters. 🙂

So I said to myself one day, “Self, why don’t you host a challenge for novellas! Ew, wait…there’s already a short story challenge, but I think novellas and short stories are different. I better look that up.” Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about novellas:

A novella is a narrative work of prose fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. While there is some disagreement of what length defines a novella, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000….Occasionally, longer works are referred to as novellas, with some academics positing 100,000 words as the novella‒novel threshold.

Sweet! I can host a challenge!

I’ve copied Wikipedia’s list of novellas:

• A River Runs Through It (1976) Norman Maclean
• Animal Farm (1945) George Orwell
• Anthem (1938) Ayn Rand
• The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) Carson McCullers
• The Bear (1941) William Faulkner
• The Beast in the Jungle (1903) Henry James
• The Alienist (1882) Machado de Assis
• The Bicentennial Man (1976) Isaac Asimov
• Billy Budd (18xx- first published in 1924) Herman Melville
• The Boy Who Heard Music (2005/6) Pete Townshend
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) Truman Capote
• Cascade Point (1983) Timothy Zahn
• A Christmas Carol (1843) Charles Dickens
• Daisy Miller (1878) Henry James
• The Dead (1914) James Joyce — a short story/novella that concludes Dubliners
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) Leo Tolstoy
• Debt of Bones (2001) Terry Goodkind
• Everyman (2006) Philip Roth
• Heart of Darkness (1902) Joseph Conrad
• The Golden Pot (1814)
• The House on Mango Street (1984) Sandra Cisneros
• Legends of the Fall (1977) Jim Harrison
• The Lifted Veil (1859) George Eliot
• Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) Stephen Crane
• The Metamorphosis (1915) Franz Kafka
• Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) Nathanael West
• Mrs Dalloway (1925) Virginia Woolf
• Of Mice and Men (1937) John Steinbeck
• No One Writes to the Colonel Gabriel García Márquez
• The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Ernest Hemingway
• Oroonoko (1688) Aphra Behn
• Plum Lovin’ Janet Evanovich
• The Pearl (1945) John Steinbeck
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962) Muriel Spark
• Senso (1874) Camillo Boito
• Shopgirl (2001) Steve Martin
• Song of the Trees Mildred D. Taylor
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Stranger (1942) Albert Camus
• The Turn of the Screw (1898) Henry James
• The War of the Worlds (1898) H.G. Wells
• The Woman Who Waited (2006) Andrei Makine
• Visions of Sugar Plums Janet Evanovich
• Young Zaphod Plays it Safe (1986) Douglas Adams
• Death in Venice (1913) Thomas Mann
• Mario and the Magician (1930) Thomas Mann
• Klein and Wagner (1920) Hermann Hesse
• Pedro Paramo (1955) Juan Rulfo
• Seize the Day (1956) Saul Bellow
• Stardust Neil Gaiman
• I Am Legend (1954) Richard Matheson

And here’s some I know of:

• The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
• Stephen King’s The Green Mile (when it first came out it was 6 or 7 novellas)
• The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin
• The Lost Boy by Thomas Wolfe
• The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
• Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
• Alentejo Blue by Monica Ali

Before I continue, the other part about why I was so excited about hosting a novella challenge is because I thought it was something that anyone could participate in. Work full-time? No problem! Mom with kids? No problem! Going to school and working? No problem! Working full-time, working a second job, and planning a wedding? No problem! 🙂 The chunkster challenge is something that is quickly becoming near and dear to my heart. The bigger the book, the better, and what better than a challenge to keep me motivated? But moms with kids? Oy, committing to reading chunksters might not be something they can do, but committing to read a lil ol’ novella is totally doable. Says the working-full-time-working-a-second-job-planning-a-wedding girl.

So please! Go ahead and sign up! The rules are easy:

1. Read six novellas between April 2008 and September 2008. I wanted to give everyone plenty of time to reserve/buy/mooch the books they want to read.
2. The novella needs to be between 100 and 250 pages (because who has time to count the words in a book, Mr. Wikipedia?). Some leeway is definitely allowed (some of The Green Mile novellas by Stephen King are 96 pages, and I would hate to exclude those. I’m a lover not a hater.).
3. Sign up! Leave a comment and I’ll add your name to the sidebar. There will be prizes (yet to be determined). I’m a competitive and loves-to-win-stuff kinda gal, so I couldn’t resist offering prizes. 🙂
4. Please review or let people know what you’ve read. You can do that on your own blog (linking back to here) or you can post a comment here or you can post the review here. Whatever.
5. Need not have your own blog to play. Again, I’m a lover not a hater.

Coupla other things:

• I don’t have a graphic for this challenge! 😦
• This is my first hosting of a challenge, so please be gentle. 😉
• Seriously, let us know what you’re reading. I believe there’s a ton of untapped novellas out there just waiting for discovery.

Umm…I think that’s it. I’m really nervous and really excited, all at the same time!